1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to the field of protein engineering. More particularly, it concerns improved methods and compositions for the screening of combinatorial antibody Fc libraries expressed in bacteria.
2. Description of Related Art
Currently recombinant therapeutic antibodies have sales of well over $10 bn/yr and with a forecast of annual growth rate of 20.9%, they are projected to increase to $25 bn/yr by 2010. Monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) comprise the majority of recombinant proteins currently in the clinic, with more than 150 products in studies sponsored by companies located worldwide (Pavlou and Belsey, 2005). In terms of therapeutic focus, the mAb market is heavily focused on oncology and arthritis, immune and inflammatory disorders, and products within these therapeutic areas are set to continue to be the key growth drivers over the forecast period. As a group, genetically engineered mAbs generally have higher probability of FDA approval success than small-molecule drugs. At least 50 biotechnology companies and all the major pharmaceutical companies have active antibody discovery programs in place.
The original method for isolation and production of mAbs was first reported at 1975 by Milstein and Kohler (Kohler and Milstein, 1975), and it involved the fusion of mouse lymphocyte and myeloma cells, yielding mouse hybridomas. Therapeutic murine mAbs entered clinical study in the early 1980s; however, problems with lack of efficacy and rapid clearance due to patients' production of human anti-mouse antibodies (HAMA) became apparent. These issues, as well as the time and cost consuming related to the technology became driving forces for the evolution of mAb production technology. Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) facilitated the cloning of monoclonal antibodies genes directly from lymphocytes of immunized animals and the expression of combinatorial library of fragments antibodies in bacteria (Orlandi et al., 1989). Later libraries were created entirely by in vitro cloning techniques using naïve genes with rearranged complementarity determining region 3 (CDR3) (Griffiths and Duncan, 1998; Hoogenboom et al., 1998). As a result, the isolation of antibody fragments with the desired specificity was no longer dependent on the immunogenicity of the corresponding antigen. Moreover, the range of antigen specificities in synthetic combinatorial libraries was greater than that found in a panel of hybridomas generated from an immunized mouse. These advantages have facilitated the development of antibody fragments to a number of unique antigens including small molecular compounds (haptens) (Hoogenboom and Winter, 1992), molecular complexes (Chames et al., 2000), unstable compounds (Kjaer et al., 1998) and cell surface proteins (Desai et al., 1998).
In microbial cells, display screening may be carried out by flow cytometry. In particular, Anchored Periplasmic Expression (APEx) is based on anchoring the antibody fragment on the periplasmic face of the inner membrane of E. coli followed by disruption of the outer membrane, incubation with fluorescently labeled target and sorting of the spheroplasts (U.S. Pat. No. 7,094,571). APEx was used for the affinity maturation of antibody fragments (Harvey et al., 2004; Harvey et al., 2006). In one study over 200-fold affinity improvement was obtained after only two rounds of screening.
One important mechanism underlying the potency of antibody therapeutics is the ability of antibody to recruit immune cells to a target antigen (or cell). Thus, the Fc region of an antibody is crucial for recruitment of immunological cells and antibody dependent cytotoxicity (ADCC). In particular, the nature of the ADCC response elicited by antibodies depends on the interaction of the Fc region with receptors (FcRs) located on the surface of many cell types. Humans contain five different classes of Fc receptors. In addition haplotypes, or genetic variants of different FcRs belonging to a particular class are known. The binding of an antibody to FcRs determines its ability to recruit other immunological cells and the type of cell recruited. Hence, the ability to engineer antibodies that can recruit only certain kinds of cells can be critically important for therapy.
However, to the inventors' knowledge, previous attempts to engineer Fc domains have been performed using mammalian-expressed IgG molecules. Mammalian antibodies are glycosylated. The carbohydrate chain is attached to the Fc region and alters the conformation of the protein and enables the antibody to bind to FcRs. In contrast, aglycosylated antibodies produced in bacteria cannot bind to FcRs and therefore are unable to elicit ADCC. It is desirable to engineer aglycosylated antibodies that are capable of eliciting ADCC and thus benefit from the lower production costs that are derived from bacterial expression.
Second, and most importantly, mammalian antibodies with engineered Fc regions display increased binding to a particular FcR of interest but in addition they are still capable of binding to other FcRs with normal affinity. Thus, while such antibodies are more selective than the molecules naturally produced by the immune system they can nonetheless still mediate undesirable immunological responses.
Nonetheless, all high throughput antibody screening technologies available to-date rely on microbial expression of antibody fragments. The use of antibody fragments rather than intact or full length IgGs, in the construction and screening of libraries has been dictated by limitations related to the expression of the much larger IgGs in microorganisms. IgG libraries have never before been expressed or screened using microorganisms such as bacteria or yeasts. As a result the isolation of antigen binding proteins has been carried out exclusively using antibody fragments that are smaller and much easier to produce. Once isolated, such antibody fragments have to then be fused to vectors that express full length immunoglobulins which in turn are expressed preferentially in mammalian cells such as CHO cells.
E. coli possesses a reducing cytoplasm that is unsuitable for the folding of proteins with disulfide bonds which accumulate in an unfolded or incorrectly folded state (Baneyx and Mujacic, 2004). In contrast to the cytoplasm, the periplasm of E. coli is maintained in an oxidized state that allows the formation of protein disulfide bonds. Notably, periplasmic expression has been employed successfully for the expression of antibody fragments such as Fvs, scFvs, Fabs or F(ab′)2s (Kipriyanov and Little, 1999). These fragments can be made relatively quickly in large quantities with the retention of antigen binding activity. However, because antibody fragments lack the Fc domain, they do not bind the FcRn receptor and are cleared quickly; thus, they are only occasionally suitable as therapeutic proteins (Knight et al., 1995). Until recently, full-length antibodies could only be expressed in E. coli as insoluble aggregates and then refolded in vitro (Boss et al., 1984; Cabilly et al., 1984). Clearly this approach is not amenable to the high throughput screening of antibody libraries since with the current technology it is not possible to refold millions or tens of millions of antibodies individually. A further problem is that since E. coli expressed antibodies are not glycosylated, they fail to bind to complement factor 1q (C1q) or Fc and many other Fc receptors. However, aglycosylated Fc domains can bind to the neonatal Fc receptor efficiently (FcRn). Consequently bacterially expressed aglycosylated antibodies do exhibit serum persistence and pharmacokinetics similar to those of fully glycosylated IgGs produced in human cells. Nonetheless, since the aglycosylated antibodies fail to elicit complement activation and can not mediate the recruitment of immune cells such as macrophages, they have previously been ineffective for many therapeutic applications.